Big News for Bloggers; LiveJournal Sold to SUP

It has been reported by TechCrunch and confirmed in comments by Anil Dash that Six Apart has sold their LiveJournal product to the Moscow based company SUP. This is big news for a number of reasons, other than it allowing Six Apart to focus their efforts on their three remaining products, it also opens lots of questions for LiveJournal users as to what new security issues may quickly develop?

A quote from October probably sums up the situation best in regards to recent attacks by Russian hackers:

“Law enforcement has no incentive and no motivation to prosecute,” said Anton Nossik, a senior executive in Moscow at the company that oversees Livejournal.ru. “They say, ‘We are not receiving complaints,’ or ‘The complaints that we are seeing are not well formed.’ They find pretexts not to prosecute.” Russian Livejournal blogs are regularly hijacked.

Whether or not this will work out to be a positive business decision for Six Apart, SUP, and the users of LiveJournal really seems to come down to whether or not SUP is willing to go the extra mile to maintain or better yet improve the level of protection that they can provide to their users.

I hope that, by divesting itself of LiveJournal, Six Apart will be able to continue to improve their product offerings and I hope this will allow SUP to bring their resources into play and devote more time and energy to the next iteration of LiveJournal.

What do you think? Will this change make you leave LiveJournal? Or are you unconcerned?